Over the past 20 years, authorities have made more than a quarter of a billion arrests, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates. As a result, the FBI currently has 77.7 million individuals on file in its master criminal database—or nearly one out of every three American adults.

Between 10,000 and 12,000 new names are added each day.

At the same time, an information explosion has made it easy for anyone to pull up arrest records in an instant. Employers, banks, college admissions officers and landlords, among others, routinely check records online. The information doesn't typically describe what happened next.

Many people who have never faced charges, or have had charges dropped, find that a lingering arrest record can ruin their chance to secure employment, loans and housing. Even in cases of a mistaken arrest, the damaging documents aren't automatically removed. In other instances, arrest information is forwarded to the FBI but not necessarily updated there when a case is thrown out locally. Only half of the records with the FBI have fully up-to-date information.

"There is a myth that if you are arrested and cleared that it has no impact," says Paul Butler, professor of law at Georgetown Law. "It's not like the arrest never happened."

ENLARGE

Precious Daniels of Detroit is part of a class-action lawsuit against the Census Bureau alleging that tens of thousands of African-Americans were discriminated against because of the agency's use of arrest records in its hiring process.
Fabrizio Costantini for the Wall Street Journal

When Precious Daniels learned that the Census Bureau was looking for temporary workers, she thought she would make an ideal candidate. The lifelong Detroit resident and veteran health-care worker knew the people in the community. She had studied psychology at a local college.

Days after she applied for the job in 2010, she received a letter indicating a routine background check had turned up a red flag.

In November of 2009, Ms. Daniels had participated in a protest against Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan as the health-care law was being debated. Arrested with others for disorderly conduct, she was released on $50 bail and the misdemeanor charge was subsequently dropped. Ms. Daniels didn't anticipate any further problems.

ENLARGE

But her job application brought the matter back to life. For the application to proceed, the Census bureau informed her she would need to submit fingerprints and gave her 30 days to obtain court documents proving her case had been resolved without a conviction.

Clearing her name was easier said than done. "From what I was told by the courthouse, they didn't have a record," says Ms. Daniels, now 39 years old. She didn't get the job. Court officials didn't respond to requests for comment.

Today, Ms. Daniels is part of a class-action lawsuit against the Census Bureau alleging that tens of thousands of African-Americans were discriminated against because of the agency's use of arrest records in its hiring process. Adam Klein, a New York-based plaintiff attorney, says a total of about 850,000 applicants received similar letters to the one sent to Ms. Daniels.

Representatives for the Census Bureau and the U.S. Justice Department declined to comment. In court filings, the government denied the discrimination allegation and said plaintiffs' method for analyzing hiring data was "unreliable" and "statistically invalid."

More

The wave of arrests has been fueled in part by unprecedented federal dollars funneled to local police departments and new policing tactics that condoned arrests for even the smallest offenses. Spending on law-enforcement by states and local governments hit $212 billion in 2011, including judicial, police and corrections costs, according to the most recent estimates provided to the U.S. Census Bureau. By comparison, those figures, when adjusted for inflation, were equivalent to $179 billion in 2001 and $128 billion in 1992.

In 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available, the Bureau of Justice Statistics put the number of full-time equivalent sworn state and local police officers at 646,213—up from 531,706 in 1991.

A crackdown on what seemed like an out-of-control crime rate in the late 1980s and early 1990s made sense at the time, says Jack Levin, co-director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Boston's Northeastern University.

"Zero-tolerance policing spread across the country after the 1990s because of the terrible crime problem in late '80s and early 1990s," says Mr. Levin.

The push to put an additional 100,000 more officers on the streets in the 1990s focused on urban areas where the crime rates were the highest, says Mr. Levin. And there has been success, he says, as crime rates have fallen and the murder rate has dropped.

But as a consequence, "you've got these large numbers of people now who are stigmatized," he says. "The impact of so many arrests is catastrophic."

That verdict isn't unanimous. "We made arrests for minor infractions that deterred the more serious infractions down the road," says James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents about 335,000 officers. "We don't apologize for that. Innocent people are alive today and kids have grown up to lead productive lives because of the actions people took in those days."

At the University of South Carolina, researchers have been examining other national data in an attempt to understand the long-term impact of arrests on young people. Using information from a 16-year-long U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, researchers tracked 7,335 randomly selected people into their 20s, scrutinizing subjects for any brushes with the law.

Researchers report that more than 40% of the male subjects have been arrested at least once by the age of 23. The rate was highest for blacks, at 49%, 44% for Hispanics and 38% for whites. Researchers found that nearly one in five women had been arrested at least once by the age of 23.

They further determined that 47% of those arrested weren't convicted. In more than a quarter of cases, subjects weren't even formally charged.

ENLARGE

Mr. Hernandez carries a laminated legal document from the Bexar County Sheriff's office confirming his innocence in case he is arrested in the future.
Ben Sklar for The Wall Street Journal

It can be daunting to try to correct the record. In October 2012, Jose Gabriel Hernandez was finishing up dinner at home when officers came to arrest him for sexually assaulting two young girls.

Turns out, it was a case of mistaken identity. In court documents, the prosecutor's office acknowledged that the "wrong Jose Hernandez" had been arrested and the charges were dropped.

Once the case was dismissed, Mr. Hernandez assumed authorities would set the record straight. Instead, he learned that the burden was on him to clear his record and that he would need a lawyer to seek a formal expungement.

"Needless to say, that hasn't happened yet," says Mr. Hernandez, who works as a contractor. Mr. Hernandez was held in the Bexar County jail on $150,000 bond. He didn't have the cash, so his wife borrowed money to pay a bail bondsman the nonrefundable sum of $22,500, or the 15% fee, he needed to put up. They are still repaying the loans.

Exacerbating the situation are for-profit websites and other background-check businesses that assemble publicly available arrest records, often including mug shots and charges. Many sites charge fees to remove a record, even an outdated or erroneous one. In the past year Google Inc.GOOG-1.10% has changed its search algorithm to de-emphasize many so called "mug-shot" websites, giving them less prominence when someone's name is searched.

On Friday, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill making it illegal for websites to charge state residents to have their mug shot arrest photos removed.

In 2013, Indiana legislators approved one of the most extensive criminal record expungement laws in the country. The law was sponsored by a former prosecutor and had a range of conservative Republican backers. One had worked as a mining-company supervisor who frequently had to reject individuals after routine background checks found evidence of an old arrest.

"If we are going to judge people, we need to judge them on who they are now, and not who they were," says Jud McMillin, the bill's chief sponsor.

The "growing obsession with background checking and commercial exploitation of arrest and conviction records makes it all but impossible for someone with a criminal record to leave the past behind," concludes a recent report from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Further analysis by the University of South Carolina team, performed at the request of The Wall Street Journal, suggests that men with arrest records—even absent a formal charge or conviction—go on to earn lower salaries. They are also less likely to own a home compared with people who have never been arrested.

The same holds true for graduation rates and whether a person will live below the poverty line.

For example, more than 95% of subjects without arrests in the survey graduated high school or earned an equivalent diploma. The number falls to 84.4% for those who were arrested and yet not convicted.

Tia Stevens Andersen, the University of South Carolina researcher who performed the analysis, says the results are consistent with what criminologists have found. The data, especially when coupled with other studies, show that an arrest "does have a substantial impact on people's lives," she says. That is in part because "it's now cheap and easy to do a background check."

According to a 2012 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, 69% of employers conduct criminal background checks on all job applicants. Fewer than that—about 58%—allow candidates to explain any negative results of a check.

Mike Mitternight, the owner and president of Factory Service Agency Inc., a heating and air-conditioning company in Metairie, La., worries that if he turns down a job applicant because of a criminal record, he could be open to a discrimination claim. But hiring the person could leave him open to liability if something goes wrong. "I have to do the background checks and take my chances," says Mr. Mitternight. "It's a lose-lose situation."

ENLARGE

John Keir says he was fired from his job after failing to mention brushes with the law on his application. Found not guilty of a recent charge, he says he answered truthfully.
Steve Gates for The Wall Street Journal

John and Jessica Keir, of Birmingham, Ala., have tried various means to combat their arrest stigma. In 2012 the married couple was accused of criminal mischief for scratching someone's car with a key. They were found not guilty at trial.

In January of last year, Ms. Keir, a law-school student, googled herself. "My mug shot was everywhere," she recalls. "I was just distraught."

Though she was in the top 15% of her first-year class at Cumberland School of Law School in Birmingham, she says about a dozen law firms turned her down for summer work. Since she rarely made it to the interview stage, she feared her online mug shots played a role. Eventually, she landed a summer position at the Alabama attorney general's office.

The couple says they paid about $2,000 to various websites to remove their mug shots. It didn't work, Mr. Keir says. New mug-shot sites seemed to appear almost daily. Keeping up with them all was "like playing Whac-A-Mole," says Mr. Keir.

Ms. Keir, who is finishing her law degree at the University of Alabama, has been using Facebook, LinkedIn and Google to create enough positive Internet traffic to try to push down negative information lower in any search-engine results.

Meanwhile, her husband believes he has been caught up in a separate quagmire. Earlier this year Mr. Keir was hired by Regions Bank as an information security official. Weeks later, he says he was let go from his $85,000 job for allegedly lying on his application.

The 35-year-old Mr. Keir says his firing resulted after failing to disclose his recent arrest record as well as a number of traffic violations during his teens that had branded him as a "youthful offender" in Alabama. He says he didn't lie on his application, and only recalls being asked about any criminal convictions.

A spokeswoman for Regions Bank, a unit of Regions Financial Corp.RF-1.70%, says the company couldn't discuss individual personnel matters, but says the bank sends applicant fingerprints to the FBI as part of criminal background check and asks candidates to answer questions about previous criminal charges and convictions.

Arrest issues don't necessarily abate with age.

ENLARGE

Barbara Ann Finn lost out on a school cafeteria job last year after a background check turned up a 1963 hit on her record, which was a surprise to her.
Greg Kendall-Ball for The Wall Street Journal

Late last year, Barbara Ann Finn, a 74-year-old great grandmother, applied for a part-time job as a cafeteria worker in the Worcester County, Md., school system.

"I was a single woman on a fixed income. I was trying to help myself," she recalls.

Along with the application came fingerprints and other checks—a process Ms. Finn dismissed as mere formality. After all, she had lived in the area since 1985, had worked in various parts of county government and served as a foster parent. Her background had been probed before.

So she was surprised by the phone call she received from the school district. Her fingerprints, she says she was told, had been run through both the state and FBI criminal databases. She was clear in Maryland, but the FBI check matched her prints to a 1963 arrest of someone with a name she says she doesn't recognize.

Barbara Witherow, a spokeswoman with the school district, confirms that Ms. Finn had applied for employment and that there were "valid reasons why" she wasn't considered.

Ms. Finn says she believes her problem might trace back to a 1963 episode when she and a girlfriend had gone to a clothing store in Philadelphia. The other woman began shoplifting, she says. Police took both of them into custody, Ms. Finn recalls, but she was released.

"I never heard any more about it and never thought any more about it," says Ms. Finn.

Michael Lee is executive director of the nonprofit Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity's Criminal Record Expungement Project and has been working on Ms. Finn's behalf for months.

The challenge, he says, is expunging a record no one can find.

An arrest record can only be removed if the local court system notifies the FBI that it should be taken out of the file. In Ms. Finn's case, the local authorities say they can't find the original record.

A Philadelphia District Court document obtained by Mr. Lee and reviewed by the Journal says Ms. Finn was never charged. A Pennsylvania State Police spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Lee has asked for another background check from the state to try to put the matter to rest. Says Ms. Finn: "I don't want to die with a criminal record."

It's really too bad that we have the sort of incarceration rate we do in this country. It creates a large class of unemployable or difficult to employ people, and limits their potential, earning and otherwise, and extends to their families and dependents, tending to perpetuate the cycle. It's a huge drag on national productivity.

Obviously this sort of screening has it's place, but what always struck me is that it's always the lower echelon jobs that are subject to this sort if scrutiny, or drug testing, while the higher echelon or office positions are not.

At my former job, our warehouse employees sometimes has to submit to drug test just to do a delivery. Obviously, hard drug use is an issue, but I used to wonder, considering how poorly they were paid, why the employer should own their weekends as well.

OTOH, our warehouse manager had a serious felony conviction in his past. Management asked him about when hiring, took a chance, and he turned out to be one of the most competent, most dependable, most make-it-happen employees in the company. Hiring him made the company better than it was before.

This is nowhere near as bad as the damage done by denying people gainful employment because of their credit report. That's like not hiring someone because you don't like the color of their car. Also, wait until you're banned from every human resources department in the country because somebody thinks you said something "mean" on the internet. Actually, that's already happened in a number of instances.

It's very strange the attention and sympathy given to the area of arrests records while these other two areas get more scrutinized and consequential by the hour and no one seems to care.

A Santa Barbara judge just ordered the arrest records of 188 people never charged to be reflected as detentions; not arrests. He also ordered the California Highway Patrol (statewide) to do the same for all eligible persons (arrested but not charged) in the future.

"On Friday, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill making it illegal for websites to charge state residents to have their mug shot arrest photos removed."

This will be a great comfort to Leland Yee, Ron Calderon, Rod Wright and Richard Alarcon, three demokrat state senators and a communist LA city clowncilman under arrest or convicted for vote fraud, racketeering, running guns, running hookers, running drugs, perjury and other felonies.

Is 4 indicted Dem state politicians out of 7,382 state
legislators the best U can do?

On the other hand, in early 1980s the Reagan Admin violated
the Arms Export Control Act & Boland Amendment by trading-selling arms to Iran in
exchange for 7 American hostages.

Profit earned was used to arm Nicaraguan Contras in their
war with the Sandinistas.

During the Iran-Contra hearings Repub's conspired to
obstruct special prosecutor Republican Judge Lawrence Walsh; 7 Reagan claimed
he did not know the answer to most questions he was asked

Walsh obtained convictions against John Poindexter &
Oliver North. These convictions were overturned because they had been given prior
immunity. Indictments were also obtained against the following Reagan
officials: Secretary Casper Weinberger, National Security Advisor Robert
McFarlane, close associates Elliot Abrams, Clair George, Alan Fiers, and Duane
Clarridge.

Reagan was saved from impeachment by president GHW Bush who pardoned
the 6 indicted officials.

Regardless of how this ends, we can be sure the fine citizens of Ferguson, MO collared for rioting and looting will demand their records be expunged. After all, they're just collecting reparations. Just ask Al Sharpton or Jess Jackson.

At the very least, legislation should be passes requiring all arrest records to indicate clearly the disposition of the case: charges dropped, found not guilty, mistaken identity, whatever. Also, records of dropped charges should be expunged automatically after a few years.

The problem with forcing people into hiring felons, is that they would be forced to take on the legal liability of resulting problems, never mind being burdened with the guilt of hiring someone to harm valued clients.

@Rob Lawton Felons will have a criminal conviction, perhaps multiple convictions, on their records. The number of times they've been arrested would be immaterial, I think. Also, no one should be forced to hire anyone for any reason in a free society, let alone felons. I agree.

In Massachusetts, there's a new state law taking soon effect - it requires fingerprinting of all new and existing teachers, and an FBI criminal background check. Finger printed first, asked questions later - if at all, given that schools have first and foremost the safety of students in their mind.

"Even in cases of a mistaken arrest, the damaging documents aren't automatically removed. In other instances, arrest information is forwarded to the FBI but not necessarily updated there when a case is thrown out locally. Only half of the records with the FBI have fully up-to-date information."

In other words, much of the problem derives from the typically slovenly government apparatchiks.

Victor, you would do better to recognize the problem of too much government and focus less on the blame. There are many areas Republicans have pushed for that I don't agree with, some that I even agreed with at first but no longer. Are you so rigid in your allegiance to the Left that you cannot not speak against issues you know to have gotten out of wack?

@CHUCK HARMON Nah. The ussr was a spying and enslavement state. People watched and spied on each other to see their targets eventually enslaved and/or imprisoned in some gulag.

The USA is a spying and surveillance state. Bureaucrats, government functionaries and corporate drones want to collect every piece of information they can about you so they can bar you from every human resources department in the country.

"...class-action lawsuit against the Census Bureau alleging that tens of thousands of African-Americans were discriminated against because of the agency's use of arrest records in its hiring process" - what's race got to do with it? Or was something edited out that needs to go back in (the article seems a bit disjointed)?

@B Berings Statistically, according to FBI records for 2012, for example, about 6.5M whites and 2.6M blacks were arrested that year. Of the population that means that somewhat less than 3% of whites and somewhat more than 6% of blacks were arrested. So we conclude blacks are more likely to have an arrest record than whites. Actually, when you look at historical data, you see when you look further in the past, say to the '50s, the stats are even more slanted. Hence to use an arrest record, to rule out someone from employment, as opposed to a conviction record would affect a larger percentage of blacks than whites. (I think we would all agree that a conviction is far different than an arrest.) So that's what race has to do with it. By the way, it's well known that in July 2009, the US Equal Employment Opportunities Commission advised the Census Bureau that its criminal background screening process could violate federal law. It seems clear the Census Bureau ignored their advice.

This is only a guess: perhaps there's a significant majority of black applicants among those who were affected by the Census Bureau's hiring process, & the attorney felt a charge of discrimination, being more serious, would carry more weight in court.

Whatever happened to being innocent until proven guilty in a court of law before a jury of your peers? It seems human resource managers have become judge, jury, and executioner for people just accused of a crime and then later exonerated. Our country is becoming Kafka's book, "The Trial." A young man is arrested for he knows not what. And then is later executed for a crime he knows not what. Don't have time to see read the book. Watch the movie starring Anthony Perkins.

Perhaps the easiest solution would be for the police to keep arrest records permanently sealed. In contrast, conviction records (be it via plea, trial, etc.) would be immediately released since this is all that we should care about. As noted by several posters below, it is pure luck that more than a few of us posting here today do not have criminal records (how 'bout a show of hands of those who did not drink more than a little alcohol when they were not of legal age?).

As an aside, I grew up in a small town in northern PA. For those with clean records and/or full of youthful indiscretion, the goal of the police was to solve problems and also keep folks out of the legal system unless they did something truly bad as the police knew the long term consequences. It was something that I didn't appreciate at the time, but it was a really smart policy.

"Today, Ms. Daniels is part of a class-action lawsuit against the Census
Bureau alleging that tens of thousands of African-Americans were
discriminated against because of the agency's use of arrest records in
its hiring process."

I'm lost.

I read the entire article. What does Ms. Daniels' race have to do with not getting a job because of an arrest record?

@Charleen Larson Indeed they are. Read my comment above. In fact read more than just a single WSJ article about anything to be far better informed generally. The WSJ is a terrific news source, but it's not the only one, it's not always right, and it doesn't have all the info anyone needs about anything. It's a good start, but that's it. Literally hundreds of articles have been written about this particular class action suit. This suit was initially filed in April, 2010, more than 4 years ago. What changed this year was that it was classified by the court as a class action suit on June 30th, more than 6 weeks ago.

"Just a microcosm of Obama's repeated shafting of low income people who voted for him"

you know, on the day of Obama's 2008 election, the markets had destroyed roughly a third of all American wealth in a matter of a few preceding months. That's when the shafting was done, and the damage wasn't confined to "low income people" or even the US.

You ignore who was in charge then, and complain that social welfare rolls increased as a result under Obama.

Old news anyway, Obama's not running in 2016. Maybe you should talk about what's right with Republican hopefuls rather than what's wrong with the oppostition.

The USA has more people in prison than India or China or Russia. With the for profit prison system in many states these states have created more crimes to fill the prisons. its insane. In many cities petty criminal charges with fees and court costs are part of the cities budget structure and cops are encouraged to make arrests for money making.

While in the suburbs white rich just plead "affluenza" and get warnings.

@Jeff Boone@EARL LANGLEY Just came back from Singapore. Their incarceration rates are far less than the U.S. Their culture is also very reserved which plays a part of it, but they certainly don't use incarceration as a form of revenue. Nonetheless it is a beautiful country. Yes, their laws are very strict. But the crime rate is virtually non-existent. Easily, the most clean and efficient city I've ever been in.

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